bogaboga writes: I am intimately involved in setting up a Debian based email system in a remote area where we'll be using solar energy to power our computers. When I took on the position of System Administrator, the blue print had been for a traditional Debian based "white box" as a server. With the advantages of flash based Solid State Drives (SSDs), I am inclined to replace the white box server with this type of notebook. I have read over the internet that these notebooks are more versatile and have between 25% to 30% better performance over hard drive based systems in various tests. Needless to say, if adopted, we will save on space, power, and have the advantage of a less noisy environment. I have also seen a video that appears to support these claims.

I'd like to know from slashdotters whether anyone has worked with such a system and whether it would be able to handle the workload involving receiving about 450 emails and sending about 200 on a daily basis. It will be doing some basic file storage as a samba server too. I have not yet selected which notebook to use and would very much appreciate some advice on this issue as well.

whether it would be able to handle the workload involving receiving about 450 emails and sending about 200 on a daily basis.

Couldn't a cellphone handle that kind of workload these days?

It will be doing some basic file storage as a samba server too.

I'm pretty sure that's mostly IO-bound, so you mostly only care about the operations-per-second and transfer rate of you SSD.

I have not yet selected which notebook to use and would very much appreciate some advice on this issue as well.

I've seen mention of small-form-factor computers that draw like 5 watts. Unless this will be doing double-duty as an end-user system (and maybe even then, depending on what kind of apps will get run), you might want to consider using one of those with the HDD replaced with a solid-state disk.